The Mr. Rosewood Contest

The parking lot of the Marrow's Bend VFW hall was already half full at five forty on Saturday, and Drake was still fussing with the sleeves of his borrowed tuxedo jacket.

"Whose jacket is this again?" Lenny asked, watching him tug at a cuff.

"Rick's. From the theater. He wore it in Guys and Dolls two years ago and it just fits, okay, it's destiny."

"It's missing a button."

"It's vintage, Lenny. Vintage is missing a button on purpose." Drake smoothed the lapels and struck a pose against the hood of the Corolla. "Tell me this doesn't say Mr. Rosewood."

Lenny was twenty-eight and working on a dissertation about river town folklore, which meant he owned one blazer and three identical gray sweaters. He had planned to stay the boring half of the couple all evening and cheer from the folding chairs. That had been the plan, right up until Drake found the sign-up sheet at the coffee shop and waved it under his nose for a week straight.

"You signed us up as what?" Lenny had asked Tuesday night, reading the entry form over Drake's shoulder.

"Lenny and Drake, couple, no relation," Drake said. "It's a joke. We're doing it as a joke."

"We are absolutely doing it as a joke," Lenny had agreed, and then Drake had practiced a monologue for four evenings in a row.

Now they walked through the double doors into the back hallway, which smelled like hairspray and warm deli trays, and found a folding table staffed by a tall man in a sequined vest. He had a clipboard and an enormous smile.

"Contestants," the man said, looking them up and down like he was appraising cattle. "Which one of you is which?"

"I'm Lenny. This is Drake."

"Joseph Hardy, your emcee for the evening, six years running." He checked a box on the clipboard. "Couple, no relation, that's you. I have to say, that is the best entry name I've gotten since 2021, and that year a guy entered as his own twin brother."

"That was not me," Lenny said.

"It was tempting though," Drake said.

Joseph handed them each a number card on a safety pin. Lenny was eleven. Drake was twelve. "Three rounds, gentlemen, so listen up. Talent, swimwear, and then a final question and answer. This year's theme is young at heart, so the judges will be looking for a man who keeps the spark alive. The judges are Donna from the bake sale committee, my mother, and a man named Gus who won this contest in 2019 and has never once let anyone forget it."

"Gus the Barber Gus?" Drake asked.

"The very one. Now. Raffle tickets are three dollars and my mother checks the cash box, so we all behave ourselves. Cupcakes are on the folding table in the annex and they are free, which tells you everything about the fundraising budget. Questions?"

"Yeah," Lenny said. "What counts as talent?"

Joseph flipped a page. "Anything that does not involve fire or livestock. Last year a man juggled. It was fine. Nobody remembers him."

Drake squeezed Lenny's arm. "Nobody's remembering the juggler, Lenny."

* * *

The annex had a folding table of donated cupcakes and a side room of rented tuxedos, most of them hanging from a rolling rack with plastic covering them like a wall of pale ghosts. Neal Hamilton, a landscape architecture grad student Lenny half knew from the library, was pinning his number card to a green blazer.

"Lenny, right?" Neal said. "You're doing the folklore thing?"

"Slide show, technically. River monsters of the Ohio Valley. Very deadpan."

"That's either going to tank or be the funniest thing tonight."

"That's the plan. One of those."

"What's yours?" Lenny asked.

Neal held up a rolled poster. "I designed a garden on a poster board in forty minutes this afternoon. It's a master's student's idea of talent. There's two thousand dollars on this thing and I need it for a field course in July, so no pressure."

"Wait, it's two thousand?"

Neal looked at him funny. "You signed up and didn't read the prize?"

Lenny turned slowly toward Drake, who was suddenly very interested in a cupcake.

"We did not discuss the two thousand dollars," Lenny said.

"Surprise," Drake said around a mouthful of frosting. "It's for your anniversary gift. I've been trying to get us a weekend at that inn on the bluffs and my tips were not going to cover it, so I figured, contest, prize, romance."

"You were going to fund romance with a pageant."

"People do Ironmans for less, Lenny."

* * *

The show started at six twenty-five, which Joseph called 'six sharp' as a joke. The hall held maybe a hundred and forty people, half of them friends of contestants and half of them there for the cash bar. Joseph opened with a song and a monologue about how Marrow's Bend was the beauty capital of the tri-county area, which the crowd received the way a crowd receives a joke about itself, warmly and with some doubt.

"Talent round first," Joseph announced. "Judges, scorecards ready. Remember, this is a family event, unless the talent is good, in which case it's a show."

Drake drew sixth. He walked out in Rick's tuxedo, missing button and all, and announced, "This is a monologue from Cold Harbor, a play by Everett Shaw."

Lenny, sitting in the fourth row, had never heard of the play. From the faces around him, nobody else had either. Drake had clearly anticipated this, because he launched into the thing like the audience had homework due. It was about a lighthouse keeper, or maybe a lighthouse keeper's son, and about halfway through Drake picked up a prop lantern and held it to his chest like it was a dying bird, and his voice did something raw on the last line, and the room went quiet before it went loud.

"He's good," said the woman next to Lenny, who turned out to be Joseph's mother and a judge.

"He's very good," Lenny said, feeling something complicated and proud.

The scores came up. Two nines and an eight from Gus, who held up his card with visible reluctance.

Then it was Lenny's turn. He had a projector borrowed from the library and twenty-two slides of alleged river monsters, starting with a blurry 1911 photograph of what was almost certainly a fence post. He read every caption in the flattest voice he owned.

"This next creature," Lenny said, "was reported by four separate witnesses, all of whom, and I want to stress this, were fishing without a license at the time."

The crowd roared. He had not expected the crowd. Slide fifteen was a photo of a muskrat labeled "clearly a muskrat, but the witnesses insist," and a man in the back stood up and yelled "that's my uncle!" and Lenny said, "sir, I have his sworn statement," and had to wait thirty seconds for the laughing to die down.

The judges held up a nine, a ten, and another nine, and Gus was smiling, which people later said had not happened since the flood.

Backstage, in the tuxedo room, Drake grabbed Lenny by both shoulders.

"You were incredible. You were so deadpan I thought the projector was broken."

"You did a play nobody's heard of and brought the house down. I read captions off a screen."

"Eleven and twelve, baby," Drake said, checking their number cards. "We're right next to each other."

"For now," Lenny said. "Neal's garden poster hasn't gone yet."

Neal went ninth, walked his poster around the stage like a game show model, and got a nine and two eights, which he received with a gracious nod and a face that suggested he was calculating something about July.

The curtain between the tuxedo room and the stage was thin, and the sound of the next contestant's juggling act came through it like rain on a tin roof. Drake held up the swim trunks he'd found in a plastic bin marked RENTAL, DO NOT IRON.

"These are mine. Number twelve."

"Those are lime green," Lenny said.

"The theme is young at heart. Lime green is extremely young at heart." He tossed the other pair over. "Yours are navy. Sensible. Very you."

"Rude, but accurate."

They changed behind a curtain in the corner, because the tuxedo room had filled up with the three brothers who did a clogging routine, and the cloggers had no concept of privacy. The curtain was meant for wedding photos. It reached maybe to Lenny's ribs.

"Okay, turn around, I can't tie these stupid strings if you're facing me," Drake said, and Lenny turned, and Drake's knuckles brushed the small of his back, and then stayed there.

"You're doing that on purpose."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"You're doing the string again and it's crooked and I think you just copped a feel."

Drake laughed low in his throat. "Can I? Cop a feel, I mean. We've got maybe four minutes and you look criminally good in navy."

Lenny looked back over his shoulder at him. On the other side of the curtain, the cloggers were getting applause. "Yes. God, yes, but be quick and be quiet."

"Quiet is your job. You laugh when I breathe on you."

"That was one time, at your mother's."

Drake reached around him, one hand wrapping slow and warm, and Lenny bit the inside of his cheek. It was absurd. They were in a VFW hall that smelled like hairspray and warm deli